BEXUS Projects of Kiel University
CHAOS – Cherenkov Atmospheric Observation System
CHAOS has been selected for the 15th cycle of the BEXUS program! The next step of our journey will be the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) in February next year in Kiruna, Sweden, where we will be presenting the current status of our experiment. The final flight will take place next fall, also in the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna.
Thank you @germanaerospacecenter for selecting our experiment, we are very excited about this opportunity!
I am Tom Ruge and I am writing my bachelor’s thesis about a part of our instrument CHAOS and in the following I will tell you what we have been doing lately.
For our particle detector, which we are currently building, we are using a transparent BGO scintillator crystal. When a charged particle flies through it, light is emitted, which is then measured. Based on how light is emitted and how it is ultimately measured, conclusions can then be drawn about the particle. Depending on where exactly the particle flies through the BGO scintillator crystal, I investigate how exactly the light is emitted and then measured by the photodiodes.
And that’s exactly what my bachelor’s thesis is about, which I started a few weeks ago. So we are trying to better understand our new BGO crystals.
I spent the last few weeks putting together the test setup in our electronics lab with the help of our team and was finally able to start my first measurement on Friday and everything seems to be working well so far. Woohoo! Now you might be wondering which particles we are actually measuring in our electronics lab when we are not using a radioactive source? They are mainly muons, which originate from high-energy particles from outer space and then fly down to us. I will now continue to work on my bachelor’s thesis and find out new things. See you soon!